The Queen's Play (17 page)

Seen though he had, if not grasped clearly, and it would take him years to form the conviction that his fate had for a while come to resemble one of those ivory men he had glimpsed being pushed about on the square board between that man and woman on the night
of his mission in the demon king's palace so long ago. Was it the king himself who had been directing from above his movements and those of countless others beside him? Was it ever possible to project the schemes of a board game onto a real war, onto reality itself? And who took his place when he took his place amidst the troops at last? Why had he not seen in the intervening centuries that peculiar game again?

Then, too, the war was
sui generis
, for its cause was not expansion or tribute, not safeguarding the lives of your people or quelling a rebellion that threatened your sovereignty, but something infinitely more complex and obscure. Defending honour, we believed. Perhaps. At least, the answer was easy for us. But what was the king defending, what did he fight for?

Pride, infamy, sinful corruption. These words had been scooped hollow by time's insistent digging, questions that kept mounting in its wake, befuddlement that knew no end. He and he alone could have answered. Ravana, the sage-king. Ravana, the possessed. And maybe not even he. And where was he now, ages away from the day when Rama's arrow had at last made its target, piercing his navel in the softening glow of the declining sun by the beach? He had fallen like any other in battle, immortal until the arrow struck home, dying like everyone else in the end from and of his beliefs.

Been here too long, seen too much, hope ebbing away into emptiness and unease. Now it was melancholy, and now melancholy diffusing into space, and now nothing. The snow peaks had sunk behind the clouds, and here mist was rising from the roots of the trees. Forever and ever, there had always been war, and the promise of peace, of untold everlasting happiness, of rivers that flowed with milk, had that golden age ever been? Or was it just a fancy, a nostalgia, the mind's instinctive bid to escape from its cruel unending predicament, the world in which one found oneself, the world where one always arrived late, with little recourse but to go down fighting against all the odds that continued to rise from day to day? Real or not, the high noon of humanity lay most certainly in the
deepest past, now irrecoverable, and the path ahead went steeply down, right to the abyss, and then beyond.

Suddenly the child thought of something, and the dark, brooding feeling was gone. His fingers began to itch. To touch, to grasp, to move. Without a warning he slipped off the tree's crown and came swishing down to the ground, the low branches breaking his fall and landing him straight on his feet. Back in his old form, the god turned to look up the tree and found the puma, already halfway down, following in his wake.

THE LAST OF the logs had long since crumbled to ash in the braziers, and outside the sky lay awash in a coral-pink luminescence. A faint sweet scent still circled the half-cold cinders, and I felt something akin to happiness rush through me. Or was it relief? Relief at what? At returning alive from the very brink of death?

This crumbling pavilion, together with its three old caretakers who unobtrusively saw to my every need, who were hardly there otherwise, seemed my one true attainment, and to be here and alive, fixed in body and spirit, was reward enough. This when I had least expected or worked for it, even if I had worked for and desired other things.

After a certain point in a man's life, he settles so comfortably into the shell of his aims or, for it is the same thing, the aims work themselves so finely into his skin, that he grows equally remote from both loss and gain, and it is only the distance he has travelled, only how far he has come in his pursuits, that holds any interest, that makes him turn time and again to reckon his vanished steps, but this too without any strong emotion, so that it is sometimes revealed to him that it is in fact the journey which leads to things and not a desire for things that begets the journey.

But maybe it was this and this alone I had wanted from the beginning, and life or fate or time or the jumble of infinite deeds, whatever it was, had seen to my wish while squaring its ledger. You could only end alone when you began so in the first place. This was but fair, just as it was fair that those who arrived together one day
returned together. Misa had followed the king into my world, or what I imagined to be my world, and so too she chose her exit, if by a different door, slipping away while I was in the throes of battle, fighting desperately for the king and for my own life.

Near the evening of what turned out to be the final day of the war, I was locked in a fierce combat with an enemy soldier who had quite bravely taken control of one of our elephants. The strain and wounds of the past months had taken their toll, and I knew I would not survive for long. And then the accursed or the blessed arrow, depending on which side you fought, lodged itself in the king's trunk, and before you knew the weapon had fallen from your hand, the conflict abruptly abandoned. Thus it occurred to you that not even of your own story were you the hero. Privilege and history overran you there as well. Like a pawn clashing in a corner you watched the game end, your life pardoned, simply because it was not you who were its focal point, but another, someone more powerful, one on whom things ultimately hinged. Your blood, your pain, your cruelty were a waste, even if the stain of loss, of disgrace, would stick to you for as long as you lived.

Yet now this was history, dead, forgotten. A vast river of sleep flowed between the past and me. And today was different, full of wellbeing, a fresh beginning. I clutched at this fiction with every bit of my will. And it grew, this thought, that I had somehow escaped from history, was outside it, watching it unroll in a procession of shadowy forms on a cloth-screen in the distance.

Late that day, I went out into the hills. Light slashing through trees, birds twittering and cooing, busily content in their tiny bird lives. Some way up, to my left, there was a group of ancient rock- caves, hidden from view by wild brambles and azalea shrubs, that I had explored on an earlier outing. The walls inside, wherever light touched them, were covered in strange dancing figures and drawings in red, blue, and yellow pigments. I thought of them as I passed the brush on my way along the hill. Were these childish sketches or high art from an earlier time? Who could tell? What the
images had meant to those who painted them could now not be discerned, was lost forever. Time was always mocking us, deluding us, here bestowing grandeur on our follies, and there turning our artistry to childish doodles.

Webbed in such thoughts, I emerged from the trees at the head of the knoll. There again was the ancient bell hanging from its rotting wooden structure, between one aeon and another, the sole visible peg in the fabric of time. I hadn't noticed that the sun had gone behind a bank of cloud, while several others were rushing to cover the sky from end to end. Soon only to the north a patch of blue remained, the eye of heaven that was fast closing, withdrawing from us, locking our age and our misdeeds in the trap of our own making, snuffing out here and now the prevailing stench of our bloody history. Was I then the last witness breathing in the last of my time's air, which, regardless of the reek of history, came to me laden with the scent of ancient trees?

This age must end, I thought, drifting toward the bell, for a new age to dawn. An age that would revere not the grand, the awe-full, the terrifying, but the small, the commonplace, the briefness of gesture. And, because of this simple turn of attention, rise in triumph over all others. An age of poets, an age for poets.

I moved my fingers over the rough, slowly corroding surface of the bell and, drawing all my strength into my arms, struck the heavy gong with both hands, marking at once the closure of the old and the coming of the new.

For their generous advice and support, I am deeply grateful to David Brooks, J.M. Coetzee, Michael Hulse, Satendra Nandan, and Vanessa Smith.

At Roundfire we publish great stories. We lean towards the spiritual and thought-provoking. But whether it's literary or popular, a gentle tale or a pulsating thriller, the connecting theme in all Roundfire fiction titles is that once you pick them up you won't want to put them down.